Rt 3 Murray Lane
Me in the kitchen of the house on Rt 3 Murray Lane, 1988
A high school acquaintance recently Facebook messaged me and asked me what the address of my childhood home had been. I told her it didn’t have one. It had a route number. Route 3, Murray Lane. She then proceeded to tell me that the house I grew up in had been torn down and a new home, a super McMansion, had been built in its place. She told me this and I cried.
It’s not that I only have happy memories of an idyllic childhood in that home, although I do have a lot. It was the place I memorized the Grease soundtrack and dreamed of being Rizzo. It was the place where I watched countless episodes of Love Boat and Fantasy Island on a tiny black and white TV, anxiously awaiting the day that I too could go on fancy cruises and visit fancy mysterious islands. It was a house where I had a lot of dreams but also had a lot of nightmares.
After I finished crying, I started wondering if the people who lived there now were as I haunted as I was in that house.
We moved to the house when my parents bought it at auction for $62,000 in 1979. My father had just gone through the first of what would be two bankruptcies and a big old house on 5 acres in what was then the country probably seemed like a great way to start over. I was six and the house was completely rundown and creepy inside and out. I didn’t even know houses could be 80 years old. My grandma wasn’t even that old. My older brothers told me that the house had belonged to the Vance family, and at one time, all the land on all sides had belonged to them. They said that Old Mrs Vance died in my room, crazy and alone.The room that was, incidentally, in the center of the house and had no windows because of the weird ways the house had been added onto over the years, making it extra creepy. My brothers were really mean.
I’m now pretty sure they made a lot of that up, but there was something in that house and I don’t know what else to call it but a ghost.
The property was magical to me when I was young. Creepy, but super cool. There were still shacks full of weird metal tools and chicken coops full of old newspapers. There were wild berry bushes and grapes growing up the hill from the house. The main house was built from stone and the well house had been built to look like an igloo. I could climb up on it and then up onto the roof and survey my kingdom. This was years before portable music players or cell phones or much anything I would do for fun today. Those five acres were my PlayStation.
A creek ran parallel to the road in front of our house, so you had to cross a small bridge when turning from the road to the driveway. I played in that creek for hours, catching tadpoles and making up stories about trolls. I stopped the first time I saw a snake. Snakes were definitely something I wasn’t crazy about and there were plenty of them on that property.
The living room of that house was my personal hideaway. While it is true that I memorized and completely choreographed the Grease soundtrack in that space, mostly what I did there was read. I read Nancy Drew, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, Agatha Christie, Christopher Pike, and later, George Orwell, Stephen King, J.D. Salinger, and a lot of other books I was way too young to read. A Clockwork Orange at age ten comes to mind.
I also read ghost stories. “True” ghost stories, fictional ghost stories, any ghost stories I could get my hands on. I don’t know which came first, my fascination with ghost stories or my belief that our house was haunted. Either way, each fueled the other and kept me up at night.
And I did stay up at night. My parents had proclaimed me to be a “bad sleeper” from birth and had given up on trying to give me a bedtime or make me stay in bed. Not tired and with no one to put me to sleep, I would stay up after the 10pm news and watch MASH and Barney Miller reruns. At nine or ten years old, I became proficient at using the Fry Daddy in that kitchen. My mom kept it in the fridge and reused the grease or oil over and over again, So every night after my parents went to sleep, I would take it out, and plug it in to let the oil come to a boil. Since it was a white block of fat, this could take up to half an hour or more, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Once ready, I would sometimes fry frozen french times and others I would make donuts out of canned biscuit dough. This time in my life would lead to a lifetime of insomnia and a love of deep fried foods. All in all, I think I broke even.
Later, after my father made his money back again, and before he lost it the second time, he would build a lovely in-ground pool in the backyard. This, in addition to our hot tub, made for awesome junior high and high school parties, especially when my parents were out of town, which was often. However, one of my favorite things about the pool was the cover. When the season wound down, someone stretched a tight net-like cover, like a non-bouncy trampoline, over the pool to keep out the leaves and frogs. As a teenager, instead of spending my sleepless nights with Barney Miller and the Fry Daddy, I would spend them laying out in the center of the pool, sometimes, smoking cigarettes, looking at the clear starry sky. This was still the country and there was very little light pollution to spoil the night sky. I would do this even on the coldest winter evenings. Luckily for me, I never got caught, as I’m sure this would have pissed my father off to no end. Not because I was smoking, but because he had worked hard for that pool and pool cover.
I didn't just read ghost stories in that house, I heard ghosts that would become stories in that house. My mother had an antique china cabinet in the dining room that was full of antique china. At night I would lay in my bed and listen to the china clink against itself as footsteps went across the hardwood floors and that room. No one was awake but me.
It was common to be sitting with someone and you both catch something --someone -- out of the corner of your eyes. As you each realized no one else was there, you would ask, "Did you…?" And the other person would nod.
There was a woman named Mary who watched me when my parents were gone, just as she had watched my brothers when they were younger. Once, when this happened to the two of us, she said, "Oh, that's just her." And I knew she was right and that it was a woman.
I felt her most strongly in that living room, the room I danced and sang and read and napped in. Once, when I was older, I slept on the couch in that room because we had a lot of company. Just as I was falling asleep, I heard a woman whisper my name in my ear and I knew it was her. I turned over and fell asleep.
There were times when I was very afraid in that house, but it was never because of "her." Sometimes, now, I wonder if she was there to protect me. I wonder sometimes if we haunt our own homes and lives with our hopes and fears. If we leave our emotions behind us as we move through the world, only to be confronted with them again. Or maybe I just read too many ghost stories.
We lost that house, and everything else, in my father’s second bankruptcy just before my senior year of high school. I didn’t have much time to grieve its loss, but to this day, when I dream, My dreams are almost always set in that maze-like old house.
I’m sad that the place where I grew up is gone, but part of me is relieved. A lot of painful things happened in that house. Most of the memories that I’ve recounted involve just me: I was alone and felt alone a lot in that home. I was scared a lot there. I was afraid, not of ghosts, but of the actual people I lived with. I cried a lot. I sometimes wished with every fiber of my being that I was not small and I could leave and never come back.
I tried as hard as I could to be a child and be happy in that house. That house and I took care of each other in some ways. There were places I could hide, doors I could sneak out of, trees to climb up, and lots of places to cover up and go to sleep.
Ultimately that house, for me, is like everything else in life: a mixed bag and somewhat problematic. I cannot think of a place I have lived where I only have happy memories. Life doesn’t work like that, as far as I know.
I do know that I never feel alone anymore and I am rarely scared or afraid. I also know that there is only so much of me singing the Grease soundtrack that my husband can stand. My dog tolerates it much better. Dogs are wonderful that way.
I hope that the people who live in the new house on that property aren’t haunted by the things that went on there before them. Or maybe they’re haunted by their own lives. I wonder sometimes now if that’s a choice. As for me, I’m going to choose to let all the bad things go down with the rubble of that old house. I’m going to choose to let them go and remember all the books I read, the dances I made up, the nights I laid on the pool cover and looked at the stars. I’m going to choose to not be defined by my pain or the house on Rt 3 Murray Lane.
